DragonCon part 1!
Blog 090208
DragonCon was terrific!
I left my place on Thursday afternoon around 12:30pm. I had the usual travel jitters of ‘did I forget anything?’ I hadn’t because I had planned everything out some time earlier.
The trip to and through the airport of Bradley International was easy. I parked in the garage right across from the hotel which was nice. Ended up being $70 for the 5 days though. Ouch.
I got to the airport so early I ended up waiting like 90 minutes to 2 hours for my flight. ZZZzzzz. So I made up my 4th ed D&D character as I waited.
The trip down was fine. Good weather and I had the window seat. Bradley’s runway seems rougher than most though so it felt like I was being jostled around. The direct flight through Delta was nice and quick and we arrived on time. The MARTA in Atlanta brought me right to the hotel although I was probably 100 feet below surface streets. That was one long escalator.
The pre-reg line for DragonCon was HUGE. It stretched from inside the hotel to all the way wrapping around 2 or 3 sides of the hotel. I was so happy I was able to walk right in and into the on-site registration. This is the third time I’ve taken this approach and have not had to wait for 2+ hours in line to get me registration. I think I waited about 40 minutes and part of that was a gaffe on my part for waiting in the wrong line. Damn Ticketmaster line! After getting my registration which I believe was $90 I headed over to the third hotel of the con and snapped up all the D&D games that I had hoped to get to and play. I was happy. J
By then it was approaching 11pm and I had been up since early morning so I went to my hotel and crashed until Friday. Friday was the official first day of the con anyways. My hotel, after review sort of sucked. But the hotel staff I encountered were terrific. Even though I was only on the 5th floor my toilet had little water pressure. This meant that even after a piss the water would hardly go down. Dropping a deuce sometimes took three flushes to get the water clean again. My heater/cooler was also really loud. On the last night it was thumping deeply to the point I thought someone was having a party with loud music and the bass was shaking my room. Only when I turned it off did I find out otherwise. The cable for the TV was really shitty. Not that I was there to watch TV but if I have cable I don’t expect bad reception. And finally, and I couldn’t tell from where exactly the noise was coming from, it sounded like people were constantly moving furniture around. The sound was that of a chair or table’s legs being dragged across the floor. It was highly annoying. The continental breakfast was decent and I was able to load up on OJ, milk, apples and bananas (green ones) each morning. They had other stuff but the one donut I had was pretty weak so I avoided them thereafter.
Friday was gaming day. The gaming hotel was the farthest from me but still a quick walk overall. I could either walk through the other hotels or go around. Because there is so much eyecandy at the con I usually walked through the hotels. I ended up playing Living Forgotten Realms 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons. I hadn’t read the rules at all so I felt really stupid. Still, my game was fun and I had a fun time replaying my favorite D&D character, Fallon Dawnrising, a priestess of Lliira. The other players were pretty cool about helping me out with things and I had a good time. The next 4 hour slot was another Forgotten Realms game and I had another good time. The con was off to a terrific start.
My third game of the day was Living Greyhawk. This Living campaign is ended at the end of the year. I had planned to play around 6 slots of it but in the end only ended up playing 2. Because I had so much fun with 4th edition though I didn’t really miss the 3rd edition Greyhawk. I also prefer the Forgotten Realms world to the Greyhawk world. I ended up playing my deep Halfling character Brownie. She’s a lot of fun to role-play. She’s a foul-mouthed multi-classed character who dislikes most humans because they enslaved her when she was young. So I really get into mouthing off as a player. The table usually cracked up too so it was hopefully good role-playing as opposed to look how awesome I am and worship me role-playing. Unfortunately, because Brownie is so spread over so many character classes she kind of sucks as a fighting character which is essential to success in Greyhawk. It didn’t seem to hurt me too badly this game although the party had a lot of trouble of a flying opponent which could barely touch. I had A LOT of fun with this game because of the role-playing I did.
For my last game on Friday I went back to playing Forgotten Realms, the new living campaign. Because I knew almost nobody I was a single player in search of a table. It’s not a bad thing but can be troublesome because I can get stuck with a group of all friends and kind of left out of the loop at the table. While in the end I still had fun with this game it ended up being average to slightly below average. This was due to two players apparently a couple. I wasn’t sure if they were married or boyfriend-girlfriend. Right off the bat the guy was very verbal in directing people in what to do. They were tagged along by a teenager that seemed new to the game. The guy almost ditched him from the table when tables were mustering before playing. I was put off by that because it felt like they didn’t even care about him. So this guy was all kind of pushy and making suggestions of what everyone should but I ended up playing my own game. Later, the girlfriend and also the guy where constantly debating the rules with the DM. This really sucks at a table. It really hampers the game and it seemed to be a pissing contest for the guy and girl to be right all the time. I found them somewhat unenjoyable to play with as they seemed more about the rules and than having fun. Strangely, the guy seemed a lot more normal and likeable away from the table as we happened to be getting food at the same place during a small game break.
After that game it was walk back to the hotel and needed sleep.
Because I had a luncheon meeting at noon on Saturday I didn’t slot a game for Saturday morning. I ended up going to the DragonCon parade and ended up enjoying it very much. The only drawback was the people lining the streets with cameras ending up trying to trump one another for the good photo and ended up moving into the street ahead of everybody blocking views to get good pic’s. My favorites of the parade were Silver Sable and huntress as they were really hot! There was a guy that had modified a Powerwheels vehicle that kids drive around into a being driven by a robot. It was really neat. And the zombie pushing the hearse. He looked terrific and stayed in character as far as I saw. I did feel bad for some folks though. There were numerous people fully clad in heavy looking costumes from head to toe. These guys ranged from Stormtroopers from Star Wars to Stargate army fatigue folks. I was hot as hell in the sun and I was just standing there. These people must’ve been dying. A lot of women wore high heels in the parade. I’m not sure how long the distance they walked was but a lot of them were wearing stiletto boots or boots with heels 4 or 5 inches high. Their feet must’ve been killing them by the end. I saw one girl a few hours later walking in just her socks and carrying her knee high stiletto heeled boots with 3 or 4 inch heels. For photos of the parade, just punch up DragonCon parade 2008 on flickr.com. I’ve found over 1000 photos so far.
Talking about high heels, a TON of women and even some guys were wearing high heels. I was surprised by how someone’s walk could kill the effect of a great looking high heel. I saw a pretty good looking Ms. Marvel. She’s a Marvel super-heroine that wears a black one piece bathing suit combined with evening gloves and thigh high boots. This attractive blonde was dressed as her and had on 3 or 4 inch stiletto boots. Except she stomped. I mean she REALLY stomped around. Her walk made her look like a parading horse or even a guy more than a woman. Later on I saw a chubby Catwoman in stiletto boots with spiked heels. She was obviously not as good looking as the Ms. Marvel but her walk was much more of a sway and I found her more attractive than the better looking blonde even though her form-fitting PVC emphasized her pear-like body shape.
After the parade I wondered around a bit trying to promote my comic that I had with me. This is my The Necropolis Chronicles comic on Drunkduck. I made sure to carry my comic so that people could see the cover and title. As I wandered through the various dealer’s rooms and then the comic pro’s I kept and eye out for eyes scouting my comic. It worked as some people checked it out but nobody actually asked me about it.
I headed off to the first hotel to meet up with the Comicbook Resources crew for lunch. CBR.com is a comic book website with many forums on comics. I usually hang out at You’ll All Be Sorry which is comic writer Gail Simone’s board. I was really hoping to meat some people from there. I was little nervous because I wasn’t sure where to go or how I would recognize people. I somewhat knew what two different people were looked like. I scouted by a group that I thought might be them. I skulked by once or twice more and decided to ask them if they were the YABS crew. They were. I totally missed the somewhat small CBR sign Perry was holding. Oops.
I met Bert first. Bert is quite a popular person on YABS and I had seen his picture. He is very friendly and quickly introduced to the rest of the crew. This was very handy as I can clam up pretty good around new people since I know sometimes I piss people off with my dry humor that can seem very serious. So I got to meet around 6 people very quickly and most I recognized from screen names. Charles RB was the first I believe to converse with me. He was really cool .He’s an Englishman still in college. His voice is awesome. He’s this skinny guy with this deep ass voice that sounds perfect for voice acting or commercial announcing. I couldn’t understand everything he said because of his accent but it was a right treat to listen to him speak. I found him engaging and enjoyable to talk to.
Soon the announcement came that Solaris and her husband were due to arrive. This I was really looking forward to. I think I’ve spoken the most with Solaris at YABS. She has been very kind and good to me and very helpful and engaging. Geez, I even have a small crush on her. Then I became enamored because she showed up in her ‘vinyl bitch goddess’ outfit. I’ve seen this outfit before in photos and loved it. She wears tight PVC highlighted by chains and metal clasps. I think it’s a halter top combined with a leather mini-skirt and a corset with lacing in the back. She was wearing platform PVC thigh high boots with 4 or 5 inch heels. She also had on cool shades. She’s in her 40’s and looked terrific! Her hair was cut really short and layered getting closer to her head with each layer. Her top most layer was blond, then about an inch of pink and then a darker color. She really looked quite fetching.
Behind her was her husband. I was happy to meet Troy and found him to be very friendly towards me and pretty cool to boot. We ended up talking a lot. He’s a pretty big dude over 6 foot. Solaris is tall too, about 5’10 normally and over 6 in her boots. Troy was still taller. He had on a kilt and had a sort of Highlander theme going on that he pulled off quite well. His arms are thick and not spindly like mine so I’m sure a punch from Troy would hurt pretty bad.
I got a nice hug from Solaris and a hearty handshake from Troy. After some more chit-chatting our troop of about 15 people headed off to the eatery Bert had reserved a table for.
Since this is 4 pages in Word I’ll continue my DragonCon exploits over the next day or so.
DragonCon was terrific!
I left my place on Thursday afternoon around 12:30pm. I had the usual travel jitters of ‘did I forget anything?’ I hadn’t because I had planned everything out some time earlier.
The trip to and through the airport of Bradley International was easy. I parked in the garage right across from the hotel which was nice. Ended up being $70 for the 5 days though. Ouch.
I got to the airport so early I ended up waiting like 90 minutes to 2 hours for my flight. ZZZzzzz. So I made up my 4th ed D&D character as I waited.
The trip down was fine. Good weather and I had the window seat. Bradley’s runway seems rougher than most though so it felt like I was being jostled around. The direct flight through Delta was nice and quick and we arrived on time. The MARTA in Atlanta brought me right to the hotel although I was probably 100 feet below surface streets. That was one long escalator.
The pre-reg line for DragonCon was HUGE. It stretched from inside the hotel to all the way wrapping around 2 or 3 sides of the hotel. I was so happy I was able to walk right in and into the on-site registration. This is the third time I’ve taken this approach and have not had to wait for 2+ hours in line to get me registration. I think I waited about 40 minutes and part of that was a gaffe on my part for waiting in the wrong line. Damn Ticketmaster line! After getting my registration which I believe was $90 I headed over to the third hotel of the con and snapped up all the D&D games that I had hoped to get to and play. I was happy. J
By then it was approaching 11pm and I had been up since early morning so I went to my hotel and crashed until Friday. Friday was the official first day of the con anyways. My hotel, after review sort of sucked. But the hotel staff I encountered were terrific. Even though I was only on the 5th floor my toilet had little water pressure. This meant that even after a piss the water would hardly go down. Dropping a deuce sometimes took three flushes to get the water clean again. My heater/cooler was also really loud. On the last night it was thumping deeply to the point I thought someone was having a party with loud music and the bass was shaking my room. Only when I turned it off did I find out otherwise. The cable for the TV was really shitty. Not that I was there to watch TV but if I have cable I don’t expect bad reception. And finally, and I couldn’t tell from where exactly the noise was coming from, it sounded like people were constantly moving furniture around. The sound was that of a chair or table’s legs being dragged across the floor. It was highly annoying. The continental breakfast was decent and I was able to load up on OJ, milk, apples and bananas (green ones) each morning. They had other stuff but the one donut I had was pretty weak so I avoided them thereafter.
Friday was gaming day. The gaming hotel was the farthest from me but still a quick walk overall. I could either walk through the other hotels or go around. Because there is so much eyecandy at the con I usually walked through the hotels. I ended up playing Living Forgotten Realms 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons. I hadn’t read the rules at all so I felt really stupid. Still, my game was fun and I had a fun time replaying my favorite D&D character, Fallon Dawnrising, a priestess of Lliira. The other players were pretty cool about helping me out with things and I had a good time. The next 4 hour slot was another Forgotten Realms game and I had another good time. The con was off to a terrific start.
My third game of the day was Living Greyhawk. This Living campaign is ended at the end of the year. I had planned to play around 6 slots of it but in the end only ended up playing 2. Because I had so much fun with 4th edition though I didn’t really miss the 3rd edition Greyhawk. I also prefer the Forgotten Realms world to the Greyhawk world. I ended up playing my deep Halfling character Brownie. She’s a lot of fun to role-play. She’s a foul-mouthed multi-classed character who dislikes most humans because they enslaved her when she was young. So I really get into mouthing off as a player. The table usually cracked up too so it was hopefully good role-playing as opposed to look how awesome I am and worship me role-playing. Unfortunately, because Brownie is so spread over so many character classes she kind of sucks as a fighting character which is essential to success in Greyhawk. It didn’t seem to hurt me too badly this game although the party had a lot of trouble of a flying opponent which could barely touch. I had A LOT of fun with this game because of the role-playing I did.
For my last game on Friday I went back to playing Forgotten Realms, the new living campaign. Because I knew almost nobody I was a single player in search of a table. It’s not a bad thing but can be troublesome because I can get stuck with a group of all friends and kind of left out of the loop at the table. While in the end I still had fun with this game it ended up being average to slightly below average. This was due to two players apparently a couple. I wasn’t sure if they were married or boyfriend-girlfriend. Right off the bat the guy was very verbal in directing people in what to do. They were tagged along by a teenager that seemed new to the game. The guy almost ditched him from the table when tables were mustering before playing. I was put off by that because it felt like they didn’t even care about him. So this guy was all kind of pushy and making suggestions of what everyone should but I ended up playing my own game. Later, the girlfriend and also the guy where constantly debating the rules with the DM. This really sucks at a table. It really hampers the game and it seemed to be a pissing contest for the guy and girl to be right all the time. I found them somewhat unenjoyable to play with as they seemed more about the rules and than having fun. Strangely, the guy seemed a lot more normal and likeable away from the table as we happened to be getting food at the same place during a small game break.
After that game it was walk back to the hotel and needed sleep.
Because I had a luncheon meeting at noon on Saturday I didn’t slot a game for Saturday morning. I ended up going to the DragonCon parade and ended up enjoying it very much. The only drawback was the people lining the streets with cameras ending up trying to trump one another for the good photo and ended up moving into the street ahead of everybody blocking views to get good pic’s. My favorites of the parade were Silver Sable and huntress as they were really hot! There was a guy that had modified a Powerwheels vehicle that kids drive around into a being driven by a robot. It was really neat. And the zombie pushing the hearse. He looked terrific and stayed in character as far as I saw. I did feel bad for some folks though. There were numerous people fully clad in heavy looking costumes from head to toe. These guys ranged from Stormtroopers from Star Wars to Stargate army fatigue folks. I was hot as hell in the sun and I was just standing there. These people must’ve been dying. A lot of women wore high heels in the parade. I’m not sure how long the distance they walked was but a lot of them were wearing stiletto boots or boots with heels 4 or 5 inches high. Their feet must’ve been killing them by the end. I saw one girl a few hours later walking in just her socks and carrying her knee high stiletto heeled boots with 3 or 4 inch heels. For photos of the parade, just punch up DragonCon parade 2008 on flickr.com. I’ve found over 1000 photos so far.
Talking about high heels, a TON of women and even some guys were wearing high heels. I was surprised by how someone’s walk could kill the effect of a great looking high heel. I saw a pretty good looking Ms. Marvel. She’s a Marvel super-heroine that wears a black one piece bathing suit combined with evening gloves and thigh high boots. This attractive blonde was dressed as her and had on 3 or 4 inch stiletto boots. Except she stomped. I mean she REALLY stomped around. Her walk made her look like a parading horse or even a guy more than a woman. Later on I saw a chubby Catwoman in stiletto boots with spiked heels. She was obviously not as good looking as the Ms. Marvel but her walk was much more of a sway and I found her more attractive than the better looking blonde even though her form-fitting PVC emphasized her pear-like body shape.
After the parade I wondered around a bit trying to promote my comic that I had with me. This is my The Necropolis Chronicles comic on Drunkduck. I made sure to carry my comic so that people could see the cover and title. As I wandered through the various dealer’s rooms and then the comic pro’s I kept and eye out for eyes scouting my comic. It worked as some people checked it out but nobody actually asked me about it.
I headed off to the first hotel to meet up with the Comicbook Resources crew for lunch. CBR.com is a comic book website with many forums on comics. I usually hang out at You’ll All Be Sorry which is comic writer Gail Simone’s board. I was really hoping to meat some people from there. I was little nervous because I wasn’t sure where to go or how I would recognize people. I somewhat knew what two different people were looked like. I scouted by a group that I thought might be them. I skulked by once or twice more and decided to ask them if they were the YABS crew. They were. I totally missed the somewhat small CBR sign Perry was holding. Oops.
I met Bert first. Bert is quite a popular person on YABS and I had seen his picture. He is very friendly and quickly introduced to the rest of the crew. This was very handy as I can clam up pretty good around new people since I know sometimes I piss people off with my dry humor that can seem very serious. So I got to meet around 6 people very quickly and most I recognized from screen names. Charles RB was the first I believe to converse with me. He was really cool .He’s an Englishman still in college. His voice is awesome. He’s this skinny guy with this deep ass voice that sounds perfect for voice acting or commercial announcing. I couldn’t understand everything he said because of his accent but it was a right treat to listen to him speak. I found him engaging and enjoyable to talk to.
Soon the announcement came that Solaris and her husband were due to arrive. This I was really looking forward to. I think I’ve spoken the most with Solaris at YABS. She has been very kind and good to me and very helpful and engaging. Geez, I even have a small crush on her. Then I became enamored because she showed up in her ‘vinyl bitch goddess’ outfit. I’ve seen this outfit before in photos and loved it. She wears tight PVC highlighted by chains and metal clasps. I think it’s a halter top combined with a leather mini-skirt and a corset with lacing in the back. She was wearing platform PVC thigh high boots with 4 or 5 inch heels. She also had on cool shades. She’s in her 40’s and looked terrific! Her hair was cut really short and layered getting closer to her head with each layer. Her top most layer was blond, then about an inch of pink and then a darker color. She really looked quite fetching.
Behind her was her husband. I was happy to meet Troy and found him to be very friendly towards me and pretty cool to boot. We ended up talking a lot. He’s a pretty big dude over 6 foot. Solaris is tall too, about 5’10 normally and over 6 in her boots. Troy was still taller. He had on a kilt and had a sort of Highlander theme going on that he pulled off quite well. His arms are thick and not spindly like mine so I’m sure a punch from Troy would hurt pretty bad.
I got a nice hug from Solaris and a hearty handshake from Troy. After some more chit-chatting our troop of about 15 people headed off to the eatery Bert had reserved a table for.
Since this is 4 pages in Word I’ll continue my DragonCon exploits over the next day or so.
posted by DungeonMasterJim at 4:08 PM
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